From: someone
Originally Posted by Marker Dinova
Because, Profky, that would be like taking UN donated food sent to the Tsunami releif efforts, repackaging them and selling them off to the people for 5 dollars a piece.
I don't know what sort of idiocy this stemmed from, I'm on a crappy connection right now and can't read all this dreck. Let me first point out that the UN often actually permits and encourages the resale of their humanitarian food deliveries to restart war-ravaged economies, shows how much you know. And I wonder how on earth all these idiots get the idea that I am asking for those who provide free items in the game to turn them over to me, so I can resell them and make a profit. That's a pretty dumb idea, eh? Dumb for them, and dumb for me. I don't want all that free stuff flooding the game, that's not the point.
What I would suggest, so that we don't live in a goddamn socialist theme park, is for people to value their time, talent, and treasure, and to put a price on their creation -- that's how normal people do it in the normal world where they aren't all celebrating themselves just for the mere fact that that they are disembodied on teh Intarnut. Now, somebody asked, would it make a difference if they charged $50 instead of $1? Of course. Let them value their labor. Then when I see they are in commerce-mode finally, I can say, hey, I have an idea for your thingie, do you want to go into business? License it, or I'll give you a commission if I make XYZ improvement on it, etc.
OR they put it in the public domain, like the Lindens' door scripts or tinter scripts. Then people put it in stuff they are selling. And then they shouldn't care, if they did really put it in the public domain and really did "get over themselves." But what happens if you sell Linden stuff "as is," i.e. the object instead of a useful script. Do you get banned? Surely everyone will curl their lip and sneer at you. Hey, I even saw somebody selling Ryan Linden's tent. And I will pay $100 for that "illegal sale" because he's in the "just in time" mode for me, because I'd rather pay $100 when I see that tent when I need it finally, than to continue to look for it in vain at those laggy telehub content deliverers. If you're all so all-fired worried about newbies getting ripped off by people reselling free Linden stuff, get a grip. First, clean up all those oldbie content kings trolling Ahern and doing infomercials thinly disguised as "help," then kvetch about Linden resales.
We don't get that many who put their items into the public domain and stop fusing over them. Instead, what we have in this game is this self-referential self-congratulatory Free Thing that must forever remain static, cannot be changed, and sometimes cannot even be passed to another. I notice that when people sell stuff for a good price, they tend to let modify be on more because they realize customers need that. But they put "no mod" when they are in control-freak free mode. There's a lot of free stuff around which no one can really use -- they can't resell it, modify it, or do anything except copy it and leave it sitting there where others copy it. It's only in the virtual world that "copy" becomes not control, but freedom. That is, you can copy, you can have copies, but you can't modify. If I buy a knock-off Gucci purse stolen as a design idea and resold for 5 dollars on Broadway, at least I can take it home and dye it purple. Here, I can't change it.
I find the long reach of the early creators insufferable sometimes. Half of them aren't even online anymore. Somebody Im'd and said, "If you were nicer to everybody and praised the early creators, they'd give you stuff more." Well, geez, that's not the point. You shouldn't have to bow and scrape and have "connections" just to do business in a world. In the real world, you don't have to suck up to someone or have connections just to make an offer to buy their thing or pay for their license or give them a commission, it's just a busine transaction in a free economy.
There is a closed, suffocating, self-referential, self-congratulatory aspect to the "early creators" and you all know exactly what I mean. Think about it, and you won't disagree. It doesn't mean they aren't nice people, whatever. But it's a pattern. I know I'm challenging the received wisdom of Creative Commons. That says copy the thing and distribute it and print it, as long as you give credit. But in SL, you sometimes can't copy that free thing, you certainly can't modify it often, and you can't even copy part of it, which is what you can do with the "fair use" doctrine on copyright law.
I have nothing I want from anybody. I do not want to resell any free thing. I am posing these as generic problems for the economy. So stop accusing me of ripping of oldbies, newbies, and midbies.
